gaia books
The Best Foreign Literature
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Can I congratulate myself? Can I celebrate beauty? For having assembled the book catalogue you've just landed on? It makes me so happy to look at this particular page. Is it simply colour theory? I believe it's a combination of the colour palette of the book-cover collage, the individual cover designs, the accompanying paintings and the layout of the site. Would you agree that a book should be judged by its cover? I do, and if you don't agree, read my article, in which I explain why you should, too.
In this section, the book catalogue brings together popular fiction, non-fiction and literary works that offer a transcultural perspective beyond the UK, Ireland and the USA, with one purpose: to showcase internationally recognised books of merit. If you are looking for a more unusual selection of books that have been unjustly forgotten or have received little publicity, explore the ‘The Rare’ subcategory.
A Young Emir Studying by Osman Hamdi Bey
Knowledge is the fountain of youth. Our scholar is seated in an elaborately furnished interior, wearing a golden-yellow robe and a white turban, surrounded by new additions of what we may imagine to be one of the greatest libraries of the Ottoman Empire: the Süleymaniye Library. Holding a manuscript to his face, he seems to be absorbed by something of great importance. What is particularly striking is the contrast between the material splendour of his surroundings and the attention directed to a single sheet of writing.
He has become a hermit, a devotee of the sciences and the humanities, whose only preoccupation is the arrangement of words. He's addicted to the dopamine rush that reading produces throughout a lifetime: the more you learn, the more you want to know. As a result, the brain remains brilliant and youthful—the eunoia effect. The wheel of life keeps spinning, and as a reader, all one wishes for is enough time to indulge in the most enlightening books.
The pursuit and control of knowledge become central themes in the following works: in The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, knowledge is a source of power, and access to it is restricted; in The Rubaiyat by Omar Khayyam, the poet questions the certainty of knowledge itself; and in Three Daughters of Eve by Elif Shafak, the relationship between reason and faith provokes debate about whether the two can coexist.
There is another angle, too. Ludwig Deutsch's painting raises a critical reading about Orientalism, how the West idealises the vision of the East. Similarly, Elif Shafak's The Bastard of Istanbul invites reflection on cultural representation.
In what ways does intellectual inquiry enrich your life?
The Scholar by Ludwig Deutsch
You should not be afraid of someone who has a library and reads many books; you should fear someone who has only one book, considers it sacred, but has never read it.
(Misattributed to Friedrich Nietzsche, but who said it?)
Welcome to this exuberant library! Here, paper birds flutter untroubled by the passage of time. The exquisite details of this haven of books could easily coax non-readers into sitting down and burying their noses in the library's secrets. Dressed in a pink silk coat with gold embroidery, an eighteenth-century gentleman sits comfortably in an ornate armchair, absorbed in a leather-bound volume. Sunlight streams through a tall window, illuminating the richly decorated interior, the leather-bound books scattered throughout and a magnificent terrestrial globe.
The globe suggests an interest in geography and exploration. Understanding the world through books lies at the heart of education, but are we really educated about the world or merely a particular region of it? Gaia Books celebrates all 196 nations. None are overlooked.
Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz offers a taste of Egypt in his trilogy: Palace Walk, Palace of Desire and Sugar Street. We travel to Armenia through Franz Werfel's The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, while Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Refugees explores displacement and identity through the lives of Vietnamese characters.
But Priechenfried also portrays knowledge as a privilege: it suggests a world in which intellectual pursuits were closely associated with wealth, education, gender and social class. Were?! Unfortunately, we still live in a world where access to knowledge remains a privilege. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini and The Bookseller of Kabul by Åsne Seierstad bear witness to this persistent inequality.
The best happy ending would be a story in which every child's playground is a library.
(Lapis Lazuli)
Without translators, we’d live in prisons of language. The scientific revolution would have faltered, and only polyglots would be able to cross national literary borders, enjoying a privilege denied to everyone else. Our understanding of the world would shrink to the boundaries of our own language.
Saint Jerome understood the importance of transmitting knowledge, word by word, page by page. His lion was always by his side, guarding coveted vessels of knowledge that only a few could decode. Thanks to Jerome, much of the Bible made its way from Hebrew into Latin, and from Latin, an army of translators carried it across centuries and civilisations, until it reached your own hands.
The Bible is the most translated book in history. It is also worth noting that the following works have been praised for their English translations: Independent People by Halldór Laxness and The Woman at 1,000 Degrees by Hallgrímur Helgason.
But the transmission and preservation of knowledge have not depended solely on the written word. Epic storytellers, bards and grandmothers, endowed with stellar memories, have passed down literary works that might otherwise have been consigned to the skulls of the earth.
We, as readers, know that certain books are miracles born of an extraordinary force, their letters rolling off the tongues of gifted poets, shaped by brilliant minds, kept alive by lovers of words. For this reason, we are indebted to Homer. To die without reading his epics would be a disservice to the master.
Incidentally, what better companions to Jan van Eyck’s painting than these works: The Kalevala, Finland’s national epic, was compiled from oral poetry; Rafik Schami’s Damascus Nights celebrates oral storytelling in a modern written form; and The Mountains Sing by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai explores the transmission of history from grandmother to granddaughter.
Saint Jerome in His Study by Jan van Eyck
Without translation, we would be living in provinces bordering on silence.
(George Steiner)
I am a Mistress of Spices.
I can work the others too. Mineral, metal, earth and sand and stone. The gems with their cold clear light. The liquids that burn their hues into your eyes till you see nothing else. I learned them all on the island.
But the spices are my love.
I know their origins, and what their colors signify, and their smells. I can call each by the true-name it was given at the first, when earth split like skin and offered it up to the sky. Their heat runs in my blood. From amchur to zafran, they bow to my com-mand. At a whisper they yield up to me their hidden properties, their magic powers.
Yes, they all hold magic, even the everyday American spices
you toss unthinking into your cooking pot.
You doubt? Ah. You have forgotten the old secrets your mother's mothers knew. Here is one of them again: Vanilla beans soaked soft in goat's milk and rubbed on the wristbone can guard against the evil eye. And here another: A measure of pepper at the foot of the bed, shaped into a crescent, cures you of nightmare.
But the spices of true power are from my birthland, land of ardent poetry, aquamarine feathers. Sunset skies brilliant as blood.
They are the ones I work with.
If you stand in the center of this room and turn slowly around, you will be looking at every Indian spice that ever was—even the lost ones—gathered here upon the shelves of my store.
I think I do not exaggerate when I say there is no other
place in the world quite like this.
The Mistress of Spices by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
The Learned Man of Cairo by Arthur von Ferraris